Using a combination of chutzpah, humour and candour, Peabody Award-Winning filmmaker Judith Helfand delves deep into the politics and economics of disaster and disaster preparedness. Why are some disasters easier to prepare for than others, and how can we get ready for what is to come? 

COOKED: Survival by Zip Code is Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand’s searing investigation into the politics of “disaster”.

 Asking open-ended questions that push people to deeply consider what it might mean to redefine the term “disaster” and reframe the concept of “resilience,” Helfand forges inextricable connections between the cataclysmic natural disasters we’re willing to see and prepare for and the slow-motion disasters we’re not – that is until an extreme weather event hits and they are made exponentially more deadly and visible.

Using a combination of chutzpah, humour and candour, Helfand delves deep into one of her nation’s biggest growth industries: disaster preparedness.

Whether it’s a deadly heat wave in Chicago or Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Harvey or Maria, these disasters reveal the ways in which class, race, and zip code predetermine who lives and dies every day, regardless of the weather and who gets hurt the worst and first, in the wake of an “official disaster.”

In COOKED Helfand challenges herself and ultimately all of us to respond to the man-made disasters taking place in towns and cities across the country before the next unprecedented “natural” disaster hits.

*This film has been exempt from classification and is restricted to people over 15 years. People under 15 must be accompanied by an adult